I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data processing and, more particularly, to mapping, at run time, a value, such as a technical identification (ID) key, to text.
II. Background of the Invention
A service represents a self-contained, self-describing program (also referred to as an application) that can be found and accessed by other applications. A service, such as a Web service, is self-contained because the application using the service does not have to depend on anything other than the service itself. A service is also self-describing because all the information on how to use the service can be obtained from the service itself. One example of the use of services is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA can be implemented as middleware, an example of which is SAP's Enterprise Service Framework (ESF).
The SOA can be used to aggregate services into enterprise services that provide meaningful building blocks for the task of automating business processes or tasks. These aggregated services are often referred to as business objects. An “object” means a bundle of variables (e.g., data) and related methods accessed by a software application (also referred to herein as a program or an application). In object-oriented programming, an object is a concrete realization (instance) of a class that consists of data and the operations associated with that data. The phrase business object (BO) thus refers to a bundle of variables and related methods that can be used for describing a business process or task.
Aggregating services allows information technology (IT) organizations to efficiently develop composite applications, which are defined as applications that compose functionality and information from existing services to support new business processes or scenarios. The services can communicate using standard protocols, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and can be described in a central repository.
Furthermore, a SOA may use a repository for organizing services and the information that the services use and produce. An example of a service repository is the Enterprise Services Repository (ESR) of the Enterprise Service Framework (ESF), both of which are commercially available from SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany.